Incoming (PC)

Near the end of last year I had a look at Rage Software's Hostile Waters and seeing as I liked it someone mentioned in a comment that I should try playing their later 2002 game Incoming Forces as well. Because according to them, it lets you do a lot of the same things "without having any fun".

Now I like pointlessly subjecting myself to hours of frustration and tedium as much as the next guy, but Incoming Forces is a sequel and I'm curious about what the first game's like, so seeing as I just bought them both in a bundle I figured I might as well play the original 1998 Incoming first. Don't worry though, I've saved the other game a space so it'll show up soon enough.

No pre-rendered 90s CG intro to set the scene here, the game's too eager to get to straight to the action. Or at least get to the menus full of choices to make. Do I want to play Arcade, Campaign Action or Campaign Tactics? Do I want to go to Africa, The Arctic, U.SA., North Atlantic or Access Denied? Do I want to fly a Comanche or... wait, I can fly things in this? Man, all these years I thought this game was purely about turret shooting. Though now that I think about it I suppose it's possible that I'm just the gunner.

Alright I'll go with 'Arcade', 'Africa', 'Comanche Helicopter' and 'Start Game'.

Oh fuck this is terrible; these controls aren't working at all. I set it to use the mouse because I assumed the game was a turret shooter, but this isn't exactly slick and responsive.

Awesome, it likes my 360 controller, now I can point my red crosshairs at the bad things properly. Crisis resolved.

So far the game seems to mostly revolve around enemy UFOs zipping over to my base to give me something to shoot at with my Comanche's purple plasma ball cannon. Plus there's beeping, lots of beeping. Especially when I'm low on health.

I think it's trying to tell me that enemies are locking on to my plane (no shit, the sky's full of the things), but it's kind of annoying as I'm trying to listen to the music in the background. This track is so late 90s it sounds like it could've come off a PlayStation Magazine demo disc. Here, you can listen along at home while you read: youtube link. It's alright music, but it's not exactly the kind of thing that gets you fired up for defending the Earth is it?

Well at least the beeping's stopped now. I've been finding it a bit hard to get out of the way of enemy fire as my helicopter's not all that keen on sliding sideways when I'm already going forward. Plus going forward is awkward too as it means tilting the nose down (and my crosshair with it).

Hey I just realised that my Comanche exploded with a good old fashioned Praxis explosion shockwave!

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

This unrealistic 2 dimensional shockwave effect is named after the explosion at the beginning of Star Trek 6 in 1991, but it was popular all through the 90s, showing up as the climactic big bang at the end of blockbuster sci-fi films like Stargate, Independence Day, Armageddon etc. Even George Lucas couldn't resist its allure, going as far as pulling Star Wars back into post-production so that he could stick one over the top of the exploding Death Star for a 1997 special edition re-release...

You don't care in the slightest do you? Okay, moving on then.

I didn't have much luck with the Comanche in the end, quickly burning through all of my four lives, but this F-22 I'm piloting now is way easier to fly (and surprisingly slow for a supersonic jet fighter).

Arcade mode isn't just about shooting down wave after wave of increasingly dangerous enemy fighters over a small base in the middle of nowhere though. It's also about constant irritating beeping. But it's ALSO about swooping down to collect power up crystals when they appear on the ground for all kinds of colour-coded effects. That purple one on the left for instance gives me temporary invulnerability, while the yellow would give me back my full armour.

Here I've just swooped down and grabbed a light blue crystal, which gives enemies seven years bad luck.

Sadly it wasn't long before my F-22 exploded, and I was soon back to the title screen. Oh I didn't run out of lives, I just thought it was a great excuse to quit.

Okay so that's Arcade mode then, but Campaign mode looks like it has a little more depth to it. Sadly unlike Hostile Waters, the text isn't being read out by Tom Baker this time (in fact there's no narration at all), but there IS a story.

Oh look, the game's set in the distant future of 2009, a time where humanity has started to expand out across the solar system with multiple space stations and moonbases, but still uses Comanches even though the program was cancelled in 2004 before they ever entered mass production. Yep, all those video games featuring Comanches in active service are a lie, and have been for a decade now.

Ah here's that turret shooting I was promised. The campaign starts with me controlling an anti-aircraft cannon, pointing my red crosshair at the red boxes and holding down the trigger. There's no heat gauge and no ammo counter so there's no reason for me to ever let go.

Oh crap I just blew up one of my own helicopters after he deliberately strayed into my line of fire, that didn't help my score any. Also I still have a score in Campaign mode, how weird is that?

After fighting off the incoming waves I reached phase two, which comes with its own Comanche helicopter! So I suppose I'm going to have to get used to flying this thing.

It's not that it's tricky to FLY the thing, it really wants to stay in the air, but pointing the gun down at these tanks makes me accelerate past them, while pointing the gun level at enemy fighters makes me slow down to be a sitting duck.

My turret does automatically aim at enemies, but only when it feels like it. You can tell it's not doing a great deal of auto-aiming at the moment by the way my energy bolts are dotted across the hills.

Phase three and now I'm in a tank, destroying enemies with a single well aimed shot each. That red 3D arrow at the top tells me what I need to be pointing at next, and sometimes there's even a little bit of driving involved, but there's never a reason to stray far from the base.

I also tried the game in Campaign Tactics mode, which turned out to be basically identical to Campaign Arcade, with the same shooting, the same phases and the same goals. It definitely never turned into Hostile Waters at any point. But right around here it did do this...


MEANWHILE, IN CAMPAIGN TACTICS MODE.

BATTLESCAPE ACTIVATED! DEFEND INSTALLATION!!

Uh? Whu...?

I didn't even get a little 'end of phase' animation to give me two seconds to adjust to the fact I was in a different mode like I did with the helicopter and the tank. Nope, the camera pulls back, this HUD appears and I have to drop the controller, grab my mouse, and figure it all out before the UFOs come flying over and blow everything up.

Okay the box on the left is the radar telling me that I have very little time left to make a move, the magnifying glass is zoom level, that's easy enough to figure out, the watch is game speed... oh thank fuck I can use it to pause!

There really doesn't seem to be much to this mode actually. I've got three units to command and I can give them instructions like 'refuel, stop, land, self-destruct and kamikaze'. Or if I want them to do something useful I can click on a building to tell them to guard it, or click on an enemy to tell them to shoot it.

And then a minute later the mode's over and I'm instantly thrown back into the tank to deal with more incoming enemies without even a health refill! This is like the WarioWare of action RTS games.

I've just thought: you know what I haven't seen in a long while? Power up crystals. They haven't shown up in the Campaign modes at all so far. Can't honestly say that I'm missing them though.

After I was finished clearing up the last few tanks from around the radar base, phase four put me back in the turret again, then phase five gave me my Comanche back. Yay.


A COUPLE OF CRASHED COMANCHES LATER.

I'm having a bit of trouble now though, as a enemies fighters keep interrupting me while I'm trying to shoot down this giant UFO. They appear to my right, one at a time, to serenade me with beeping as they're blasting me with space lasers, and even though I can see them coming on the radar, I just can't seem to turn and shoot them fast enough to avoid getting hit myself.

My poor helicopter can only take a limited number of hits before it explodes and I've only got a limited number of lives, so I wish they were a little less quick on the draw. At least I restart at the beginning of the phase and not the beginning of the whole level each time.


LATER, IN PHASE 7.

Hey there's actually a bit of a story developing here. It seems that all of my 'deliver the package', 'destroy waypointed object' objectives in each phase were all part of a plan to capture a downed alien fighter.

Those aliens were doing that 'beep beep, attack from the left', 'beep beep, attack from the right' thing to me the whole way I was carrying this crate, but fortunately I've gotten better at holding the trigger, and spinning the chopper around to let the auto-aim deal with them. Though I was caught out when the phase continued after delivery and an incoming wave came and slaughtered my wounded helo instantly.

Now I have to go pick up the cargo crate again.


EVENTUALLY.

Aw hell yeah! I get to fly the captured alien ship back home, with the goal of slaughtering all invaders along the way!

Oh this thing is much much easier to steer around. These poor bastard flying saucers really don't stand a chance against my captured space fighter.

But then 50 seconds later it was all over. That's all the time I get in the spaceship ride, and now I have to land it and let someone else have a go. There are incoming enemies you see and someone has to man the turret to shoot at them.


SOON.

With all ten phases complete the game gives me a score and another small slice of story.

It's their own fault you know, all those wrecked buildings. If they didn't want me to put bullets into their chimneys and radar dishes, they should've put my turret somewhere higher, with an unobstructed view of the incoming targets I was being yelled at to shoot down.


SOON.

The second mission turned out to be more of the same, except I got to play around in the snow this time around.

Oh also I've learned that these landing pads actually repair my vehicles when I drive over them, which definitely helped me last through phases longer.

Though with only one life remaining from the first mission it was pretty inevitable that I'd screw up and lose at some point. And that's how I learned that there's no level select and no continues. You're given just four lives to last you through the whole game it seems; well unless you get an extra one at 250,000 points, it is a very arcadey kind of game.

In fact in 2003 (5 years after release) Incoming was ported from PC to VR Vortek V3 arcade machines, joining rail shooters like Beach Head 2000, Beach Head 2002, Beach Head 2003 and TotalBiscuit's favourite example of Steam shovelware Desert Gunner. It also made its way to Dreamcast and with these graphics I'm sure it fit in just fine.

That wasn't a knock on the game or the Dreamcast by the way, as Incoming was a very flashy game in its day. It was sometimes bundled in with cutting edge Voodoo2 graphic accelerators to show off what the card could do.

Okay I've tried and failed at Arcade and both Campaign modes, but before I turn it off I have to give multiplayer a shot. Because it has split screen.

Seriously, despite how it looks that isn't just two screenshots stretched out and stacked on top of each other, that's a proper split screen mode in a PC game.

It's actually surprisingly difficult to control an A-10 and a MiG-29 simultaneously while also taking screenshots and I'm struggling just to get both of them pointed at something interesting, but it's reminding me of the days when I used to play 4 player Lylat Wars/Star Fox 64 (against three other people, not by myself) so I'm grateful for that at least.

There's three multiplayer modes here, 'Body Count', 'Defence Force' and 'Team Play', presumably featuring co-op and competitive gameplay, and it appears that you can combine split screen and online/lan play for additional multiplayer potential! Probably. It does seem like it'd be more fun in two player (huge shock), so I'm beginning to see why people were so disappointed when Hostile Waters was single player only.


CONCLUSION

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"INCOMING BEEP BEEP BEEP SHOOT THE RED BOXES BOOM", it's basically a game of that. There's no dogfighting, no Star Fox style progression through a level, no feeling that you're actually flying something, just incoming targets, waypoints to destroy and a small map to hover around. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but I found it very difficult to keep my attention from wandering.

One thing that might have helped if I'd known about it from the start is that you can save at any point you want, as many times as you want. It means that you can bypass the lives system entirely if you want to by loading a save each time you die, and I would've really really wanted to. I mean going for an arcade style experience is fine, but arcade games tend to have continues.

Oh also it would've been great if I'd figured out that the lack of an ammo counter on my turret's secondary weapon display didn't mean I was out of ammo. I had unlimited homing missiles all along and wasted them all by not using them. They're not quite so unlimited in other vehicles, but they're definitely handy when the auto-aim is being temperamental.

I can't really recommend this one, although I wouldn't warn people away from it either. I can at least confirm that the GOG.com version of Incoming seems to run just fine in Windows 7 with no issues (the CD soundtrack even works).

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If you want to leave me a comment about Incoming, my article, or my website, then personally I reckon you should go for it. Seriously, tell me what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong or else I'll never learn and it'll be all your fault.